Malcolm Browne, Journalist Who Took The 'Burning Monk' Photo, Dies

Malcolm Browne was a first-rate reporter who spent decades at The New York Times, covered wars around the world and won the Pulitzer Prize for his writing about the early days of the Vietnam war.
And yet he will forever be remembered for one famous picture, the 1963 photo of a Buddhist monk who calmly set himself on fire on the streets of Saigon to protest against the South Vietnamese government, which was being supported by the U.S.

In a war that would produce many shocks to the American public, Browne's photo was one of the first and remains an iconic image of the war a half-century later.

Browne, 81, died Monday at a New Hampshire hospital. He had been suffering from Parkinson's disease in recent years.

Browne went to Vietnam as a young reporter for the AP when the war was in its early stages, a small conflict well below the radar for most Americans.

In an interview last year with Time, Browne detailed how the famous photo came about. He said he had cultivated contacts with monks who had become active in opposing the government. He told Time:

    "Along about springtime (1963), the monks began to hint that they were going to pull off something spectacular by way of protest ...

    "The monks were telephoning the foreign correspondents in Saigon to warn them that something big was going to happen. Most of the correspondents were kind of bored with that threat after a while and tended to ignore it. I felt that they were certainly going to do something, that they were not just bluffing, so it came to be that I was really the only Western correspondent that covered the fatal day."

The photo had an immediate impact.

As the AP noted in its story on Browne's death, "The photos he took appeared on front pages around the globe and sent shudders all the way to the White House, prompting President John F. Kennedy to order a re-evaluation of his administration's Vietnam policy."

Source: NPR